The Politics of Risk

Risk is a risk in itself. It is risk for you if you dare bring it up. Have you ever identified the risk, in writing, that your boss' inherent inability to make decisions is going to sink the project? How about the company loss of market share will require laying off half the project team? Or, that the project manager has never had a successful project? These are CLMs (career limiting moves). Even mentioning such common risks as a company's inexperience in the project's domain is too risky to put in the risk register. It is as if management enjoys blissful ignorance and relishes the firefight that ensues. Cowboy mentality. Identifying risk, modeling mitigation plans, and compiling contingency are too boring compared to the thrill of disaster recovery.

It is Not Risk, it is Part of Doing Business

The sources are many fold. I have heard every reason for not putting risk in the register. "It is not a risk. That is the cost of doing business." That was a favorite one. It was in response to the risk that a majority of the key people might leave. The rumor was they were frustrated with the mismanagement and looking for new jobs. Instead of trying to improve working conditions or cross training people, both required admitting a problem existed, it was better to ignore the issue and try to convince people it was a normal part of business. It is hard to explain the rationale. Even trying to write it down in a coherent sentence is difficult.

Your Own Plans

I am a firm believer that good project managers assume authority—enough, at times, to hang themselves. Maybe this requires a second, private risk register where project managers maintain a private stash of mitigation and contingency plans. Somehow, they need to develop a set of plans to thwart the possibilities, even if through covert means. This will run opposed to management's desires, but it is the job of the project manager to plan for problems.

In the above case, I rebuilt the schedule and staffing plans to include two extra people and cross training everyone on the project. After the project successfully completed, I had an interesting conversation over beer. The cross training had an unintended effect—no one felt they could hurt the company by leaving, so they stayed waiting for a better opportunity. I took a beating for labor costs, but we delivered the project.

Be Assertive

If the project delivers on time and within budget, people forget that you were, depending on your gender, a female dog or rectal sphincter. The trick is to employ tools that remove the emotion. Address indecision by using action item logs or, better yet, corporate issue tracking systems. Use them from the first day on the job. This creates an expectation of accountability. Befriend sponsors, managers, and steering committee members to work as your allies—someone you can trust. Use them to apply peer pressure on managers that have trouble addressing open action items.

If the probability of a risk is too high, make it a task. It is a good practice that when a risk has more than 60 percent chance of occurrence it should be a task. Drop the threshold to 45 or 50 percent. This is better than padding the timeline, since padding cannot be removed. Tasks that are shown to be irrelevant can be, moving the entire schedule to the left.

Hiring third-party consultants to identify risks is mitigation in its own right. Leave the risk of identifying risk to someone that is expendable. This is a primary benefit of the outside consultants recovering projects. They are justified by their expertise, revered by management, and have free license to talk about the elephant in the room. The challenge is convincing management that there is a problem large enough to require outside help. Without management realizing that there is an irresolvable issue, little can be done to address it.

The Project Manager's Bottom Line

Risk is neither bad nor good—it is a fact of doing business. However, it requires management to admit there is a problem, understand how to address it, and, if it becomes an issue, how to lessen its impact. It takes forethought and planning. Too many managers operate with their heads in the sand and it becomes incumbent upon the project manager to lead and educate. It is true here, as in many areas of project management, the project manager is a leader managing up and down the chain of command.

Related items

The other day a Latvian student contacted me for my views the connection between culture and success criteria—an important and intriguing topic. After working in Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Israel, United States, and Canada, I wear many scars of both blatant and subtle cultural violations. I also know that within a culture one person's success is often another person's failure. So, after dispelling concerns about clicking on some random email link, I completed her survey (please feel free to take it yourself). In the process, I struck up a friendship with the student, Kristine Briežkalne, who is studying at Riga International School of Economics and Business Administration . She has some interesting views and presented me with a Venn diagram showing four frames to a project (business, client, project management, and growth perspectives) and how they intersected. As the diagram is part of her Master's thesis, I will let you ponder the how to label the overlapping areas (an eye-opening exercise).

There is a reason we do not teach classes on fixing failing projects. Many a cynic feels that we simply do not want to teach our trade, however, our reason is far nobler—we should be teaching prevention rather trying to create white knights to save the day. It is the same philosophy as building a fence at the cliff's edge rather than an emergency room at its base. Our language is replete with idioms telling us to look past the symptom and address problems at their root cause. 'An ounce of prevention versus a pound of cure' or 'a stitch in time saves nine.' Please, feel free to supply your own in the comments. Unfortunately, most of our businesses loathe this philosophy, waiting to address an issue until it is irrefutably broken.

Trust relationships, certifications, and standards sound like such a safe harbor. These sound like such great words in a proposal or statement of work. How could you possibly go wrong building a trusted relationship with a customer by committing to follow a standard? In fact, this can burn you… in court.

No one ever starts a project with the goal of ending up in court. In fact, litigation may never cross your mind; after all, you have built a trusted partner relationship. Taking a few cautionary steps, however, will make your life easier if you end up in that ill-fated litigious position. Your best chances for success come long before you enter the courtroom—even before the project starts.

It was such an innocuous question, "Working on an article; what is the biggest problem you see with project governance at orgs? Can you comment?" Can I comment? Really? That is like cheese to a mouse. Where could I start—bureaucracy, draconian process, poor executive sponsorship, disengaged leaders? Plenty of fodder, because they all lead to project failure. I fired off, "Creating an over bureaucratic morass stifling innovation & implementing process instead of cultivating leaders." Then the maelstrom started and it went directly to the gap between the executives and projects managers. Naomi Caietti, Robert Kelly and I had a great conversation. Most of the thread is below.

After nearly 30 years of project work, I struggle to understand the role of a project management office (PMO). Even though, I have written of the pros and cons, and read a plethora of articles, opinions, and how-to guides little has been done to convince me that the PMO is reducing project failure. It seems to be nothing more than a tool to fill a void in leadership? Even the acronym, which is so widely thrown around, has little meaning as the "P" has no less than four meanings. It is an executive's crutch for their lack of understanding in how projects work. These, like other, unattended holes in the corporate accountability create opportunities for new and greater bureaucracies and empires that further obfuscate accountability.